School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses
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ItemA little piece of the real : on the critical theory of Slavoj Zizek( 2002)This thesis argues two contentions. The first is expository, pertaining to the question of how to read Zizek. The second is critical, and has two components: i. The Expository Contention: I argue in the first four chapters that Zizek's intention is to produce a latter-day Marxist critical theory of social reproduction, which would also allow him to locate theoretical possibilities, and possible modes of political agency, capable of challenging the contemporary neoliberalist hegemonic order. The central category in Zizek's critical endeavour is that of 'ideology'. Zizek argues that he can redeem this category against the two charges levelled against it by its manifold 'post' or non-Marxist critics. These are: - that the classical Marxist model of 'ideology' which sees ideological discourses as capturing subjects at the level of what they consciously think is irrelevant today, yet: - the expanded forms of the category of 'ideology' in such theorists as Lukacs and Althusser, which perceive 'ideologies' as directly informing social practices, collapse the category into a purely descriptive anthropological category devoid of critical potential. I contend that is in the light of a desire to generate an adequate descriptive theory of later modern social reproduction via a reclaiming of the category of ideology that Zizek turns to Lacanian psychoanalysis: - In response to the first charge against the relevance of the category of 'ideology', I hold that Zizek argues that ideologies interpellate individuals primarily at the level of the Freudian unconscious, which he takes to be manifested and reproduced in subjects' intramundane activities, and that ideologies work by structuring regimes of jouissance for subjects in what he terms 'ideological fantasies'. - In response to the second charge, I hold that Zizek has recourse to a distinction between 'reality' as the horizon of subjects' meaningful experience - which (he thinks) is always structured by ideology - and 'the Real'. Crucially, he conceives this latter not as any substance or solidarity that is wholly outside ideology, but (most deeply) as "the deadlocks of formalisation" preventing any hegemonic ideology from ever achieving full consistency with itself. It is his theory's uncovering of this Real, he contends, that enables it to maintain a critical distance vis-a-vis ideologically reproduced reality, by showing how the latter never achieves the legitimacy it lays claim to. Accordingly: My position is that Zizek is to be read as proposing a species of immanent critique of ideology which would enable him to denounce contemporary hegemonic discourses and practices as 'ideological', and so point towards ways of unifying theory with contestatory political practice in the contemporary socio-political conjuncture. ii. The Critical Contention: I contend that the greatest merit of Zizek's theory of ideology is to proffer an explanation of the radical self-reflexivity of power in later modernity. His Lacanism allows him to explain how contemporary capitalism can allow subjects to be consciously cynical of its explicit ideological terms, while relying with near-certainty upon their more lasting conformity. Yet my critical contention is that Zizek's attempt to regenerate an immanent critique of contemporary capitalism is inadequate to Zizek's own ambitions for it. - At the level of his attempt to deploy a description of the contemporary situation, I argue that the inadequacy of Zizek's project is indicated by his hesitations about how to conceive of two central categories: 'capitalism' and 'class struggle'. - At the level of his prescriptive political philosophy, my contention is that the inadequacy of his immanent critique is indicated by Zizek's hesitations about supporting or opposing a radical democratic political prescription; about supporting or opposing a redemocratising mode of political activism; and between defending a rigourously formalistic Kantian ethics, and attempting to generate a substantive ground of normative ethicopolitical value. While these inadequacies themselves are deeply telling given Zizek's own intentions, the second component of my critical contention is that they are to be read as the epiphenomena of the deep incapacity of Zizek's undergirding theoretical system to generate any guiding tenets that would have enabled him to unify theory and praxis. My central argument here is hence one that opposes me to Laclau, but situates me closer to Elliot, Rubens, Butler and Bellamy, of the authors who have so far critiqued Zizek's work. Yet (unlike Rubens and Elliot) I contend that we need not commit ourselves to an alternative substantive philosophical anthropology, to locate what falls short about Zizek's Lacanianism. Primarily: I contend that Zizek's problems arise from how, in the language of German idealism, he elevates the Kantian category of antinomy over the Hegelian-Marxist category of contradiction as the philosophical category which he thinks is capable of explaining how hegemonic ideologies fail, and so can be critiqued. Because of this categorial choice, the following consequences follow more or less immediately, I think; - the 'antagonism' rending any hegemony which Zizek's theory enables us to locate is primarily metaphysical, not political. Although the historical forms it will take are empirically unpredictable, that such points of antagonism will occur is deducible a priori; - equally, it can be predicted in advance that any attempt by a social particular to politically and/or veridically represent or 'hegemonise' the social universality will be flawed. (It will have, indeed, all the validity of someone inferring that the world must have had a beginning because everything he has so far experienced has). And I think it is precisely these two theoretical faults that underlie Zizek's manifold hesitations as to how to bring his theory to bear on praxis today.